Much traveled Chicago product John Giannini is cleaning up a mess at La Salle

Explorer has difficult path

December 29, 2004|By Bonnie DeSimone. Special to the Tribune.

PHILADELPHIA — John Giannini coaches in a small gym decorated with oversized banners. The banners, swaying in a slight draft, embody the ghost of achievements past: high finishes, great players and La Salle University's lone national basketball championship, won 50 years ago.

La Salle partisans have been waiting quite some time for those banners to be moved aside for new ones. The Explorers' last winning season was 12 years ago. Last summer the team was thrown into disarray by rape charges against three since-dismissed players and the coach's subsequent resignation.

When Giannini took the La Salle job in late August, he inherited nine scholarship athletes, a waist-deep position in a competitive sinkhole and a lot of skepticism. His friends say he is precisely right for the job.

This Fenwick High School and North Central College graduate, who cut his teeth on Chicago's vibrant high school basketball scene of the late 1970s, has a history of aiming for heights that seem beyond his vertical leap.

Giannini defied athletic odds by becoming a successful Division I head coach at the University of Maine in his 30s after playing and coaching at Division III schools.

He also refused to be pigeonholed academically. Once rejected by the University of Illinois' graduate program, he eventually returned to earn a doctorate in kinesiology with a concentration in sports psychology. He was an assistant on Lou Henson's staff in the late 1980s.

"It was interesting to come back to the same professors who told me I wasn't Illinois material and get into the PhD program," Giannini said.

His mentor at Illinois was assistant coach Mark Coomes, now an assistant at Illinois-Chicago.

"There are not a lot of people like John in the coaching profession," Coomes said. "He is truly a complete guy--an educator, a tireless recruiter, a family man. He will make very smart decisions about who to go after. It's going to take some time, but he'll get 'em back."

La Salle is 2-7 after beating American 66-53 Tuesday, with two of the losses coming to Philadelphia Big Five rivals Penn and Villanova. The team's other victory, an upset of Southern California, was so stunning it gave then-teetering USC coach Henry Bibby a final shove off the cliff.

That night, Giannini said, "gave everyone who loves La Salle a small taste of what it's like to enjoy basketball again."

But this pragmatist knows his patchwork team will hydroplane and occasionally wreck, as it did in an embarrassing 60-48 loss at home to Central Connecticut State.

"We were not ready to play," Giannini said afterward. "It's the sign of an immature team when you get excited to play some teams and not others."

The cover of that night's game program proclaimed "The Doctor Is In," a nod to Giannini's predictable nickname. But La Salle's players say they don't need a shrink as much as they need a leader.

"I wanted a winner," junior guard Jermaine Thomas said, "someone who had been in a winning tradition and knew how to win. Loyal, honest, hard-nosed . . . I mean, a coach.

"From Day One, he came in, told us what he wanted and how things were going to go. You can't help but respect a man like that. It was kind of comforting, actually, hearing those words."

A student of motivation

Fenwick's classrooms transformed the boy from Elmwood Park into a driven student. The Fenwick Friars' victory over powerful Westinghouse when Giannini was a sophomore triggered a lifelong passion.

"I decided at that moment that I wanted to play in games like that," he said.

Giannini became a varsity player but later, candidly assessing himself as too small and slow for major-college ball, opted to attend North Central College in Naperville.

After he was accepted into North Texas State University's master's degree program, he cold-called coach Tommy Newman, got his first coaching job and began the itinerant journey that would bring him to Parkland Community College in Champaign, then to Illinois and then to a seven-year stint at Division III Rowan (N.J.) University that culminated in a national title.

His graduate studies centered on an analysis of athletes' motivation.

"I could have gone on to a faculty position," Giannini said. "I was just addicted to the adrenaline of coaching."

Giannini migrated to Maine, which had no national profile when he arrived.

"I knew someone that driven and that smart was going to get it done here," said former Maine athletic director Suzanne Tyler, who gave Giannini the rare chance to jump from Division III.

Recruiting players to an isolated inland campus in a cold-weather state with an infinitesimal minority population posed a challenge on which Giannini thrived. His wife and two daughters prospered, and he enjoyed the woods and the fishing. He was interviewed for the La Salle coaching vacancy three years ago but withdrew his name from consideration.